Of all boring breakfast foods, I think toast may well be the most boring. Well, some designers and artists at Inseq, an Austrian graphic design and product development firm, decided to kick the underappreciated toaster up a notch: "What if we could make toast...with pictures!" Lo and behold, they invented the Zuse.

The Zuse is a wall-mountable toaster... that is, a "compact toasting device." It works like a printer that uses burnt toast as ink. According to the creators, "It is automatically activated through an optical sensor when any slice of bread is put in. As a special gimmick, it is possible to burn black and white pictures with a resolution of 12 by 12 pixels into your toast using a line by line toasting--a technology similar to early matrix printers."

The only image of the Zuse shows fresh, hot Space Invaders toast waiting to be buttered, but other designs come pre-programmed into the Zuse for random toasty fun. But if you're looking to own one, sorry--the Zuse was a product-design project, and right now it looks like Inseq doesn't have any plans to sell it, although apparently the Zuse has turned up at a few design showcases.

Post by Alan Henry